Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species

by Ursula K. Heise

FIGURE 2 Map accompanying Mujirushi Ryōhin’s “Extinct Species” toy figures (2010). Author’s photograph.

What does it mean to give a set of extinct- species toys to a kid to play with or to an adult to enjoy aesthetically, I wondered? Why do we produce and consume replicas and images of endangered and extinct species as commodities, and with what effects? Do they draw attention to an urgent environmental crisis or, on the contrary, trivialize it? Do they use an everyday object slyly

Studying the imaginative webs that surround endangered species will, I hope, be helpful in thinking about conservation and its public face in the future. But it also shows some of the crucial ways in which animals and, more rarely, plants and other organisms, are cultural tools and agents in humans’ thinking about themselves, their communities, their histories, and their futures.

of the best-known popular-science books on species extinction, Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo. Quammen’s account alternates between lists of extinct species and detailed analyses of individual cases (cf. Garrard 2004, 156; and chapter 2). His case study of the dodo aims above all to show that the demise of the last